Dead infant found in duffel bag

A worker at an East Side recycling center found a dead infant in a duffel bag while sorting items on a conveyor belt. The baby was believed to be between 1 and 10 days old.

Photo By Helen L. Montoya/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Workers discovered the body of a newborn infant at the Waste Management facility on FM 1346 on Monday Dec. 23, 2013.

Photo By Helen L. Montoya/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Workers discovered the body of a newborn infant at the Waste Management facility on FM 1346 on Monday Dec. 23, 2013.

SAN ANTONIO — The body of a dead infant was found in a blue duffel bag Monday afternoon by a recycling center employee sorting items on a conveyor belt.

Officials did not say whether the infant was a boy or girl, but police Sgt. Daniel Gonzales said the infant was believed to be between 1 and 10 days old. If an autopsy shows that the child was killed prior to the body being discarded, the case could become a capital murder investigation, he said.

Gonzales said the East Side recycling center's manifest showed that the baby likely came to the center with items collected between Saturday and noon Monday. The body could have come from San Antonio or an outside county, he said.

The employee was sorting in the “single stream” area — which includes household materials such as plastic bottles, paper and glass — when the duffel bag came across on the belt, Doughty said.

Employees immediately shut down operations and called police, she said. Those working in that area were sent home.

The list of all vehicles that went into the center was handed over to police, Doughty said. She could not recall any similar incidents during her 12 years with the company.

Officials did not initially know the cause of death or if the baby had been born dead. In Bexar County, there were 20 child abuse or neglect deaths in 2011 and 19 in 2012, according to state records.

In 2011, the county had 5,915 confirmed cases of abused and neglected children — more than any other area in Texas, including Houston, which has nearly three times as many children.

In one of San Antonio's most recent abandoned baby cases, parents Julie Navejar, then 16, and Ramiro De La Rosa, then 18, left their already dead 7-week-old daughter in front of a West Side firehouse in September 2009.

Baby Jayda was left with a note suggesting that her parents were trying to give her a better life, and authorities were not initially sure if she succumbed to the elements before an emergency responder found her. But investigators later determined that she was already dead from malnutrition and chronic pneumonia.

Navejar was sentenced in March 2012 to 12 years in prison. De La Rosa was sentenced later that month to 18 years.

In 2010, contractors spent days searching an East Side landfill, at the request of police, for the remains of 8-month-old Gabriel Johnson, who had last been seen in San Antonio just after Christmas 2009. He was never found.

The boy's mother, Elizabeth Johnson of Arizona, told police she suffocated her baby and disposed of his body, but she later recanted and said she gave the baby to a couple at a park in San Antonio. She was sentenced in Arizona last year to more than five years in prison after convictions for custodial interference and unlawful imprisonment.

San Antonio's Houston Street recycling facility takes in both commercial and single-stream recycling. Materials are gathered from the city of San Antonio, its residents and businesses.

Because single-stream operations are separate from commercial, the center's commercial operations remained running Monday, company spokeswoman Doughty said.